11-9-07
The Adaptation Game
Chicago Theatres are finding it harder to compete with movies to get rights.
Live Bait's 2002 production of Death on a Pink Carpet
Chicago is a hotbed of adaptation. Writer/directors such as Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman routinely create stage works from literary and other nontheatrical sources that enjoy triumphant runs in regional theatres and on Broadway. Smaller companies such as Lifeline, Piven Theatre, City Lit, and Live Bait have long incorporated adaptation as a staple of their programming. Adaptation is every bit as identifiable with the local theatre ecology as improv and sketch comedy.
But theatres have an increasingly difficult time getting stage rights for contemporary properties. As Lifeline artistic director Dorothy Milne pointed out in a recent PerformInk article (“Midlife Theatres: Surviving the Shifts,” April 13, 2007), “Nowadays even magazine articles are sold for movie rights. Sometimes the authors we approach are really excited. And then they talk to their agent and they find out that the rights were sold to the movies.”
But with persistence, smarts, and luck, it’s still possible to get permission to bring literary properties that aren’t already in the public domain to life on stage. We talked to several writers who have worked extensively in adaptation (and one newbie) about how they have learned to negotiate to get what they want.
Lifeline works almost exclusively with adaptation, both in their mainstage season and with their KidSeries youth shows. Reinforcing the point she made in the earlier PerformInk piece, Milne says “The only thing you can’t trust is that the author really knows what the rights [situation] is. We’ve had the thing where the agent calls and says, ‘They don’t understand that when they sold the movie rights, they no longer own their book.’”
But sometimes you just have to wait for Hollywood to be done with it. Milne points out that Lifeline had attempted to obtain the rights to Julian Barnes’ 1991 novel “Talking It Over” a few years ago, but it was tied up with the film rights. Since then, however, a film version (Love, Etc., which is also, confusingly enough, the title to Barnes’ sequel novel) has been released, which meant that stage rights were once again available. That show, adapted by Peter Greenberg and directed by Milne, opens in February 2008 at Lifeline.
Milne acknowledges that theatres seeking adaptation rights aren’t unique in the difficulties they encounter. “I know that people who do published plays have the same challenge. If some big theatre wants it, you won’t get it. We really don’t have an issue where we’re tussling over rights with some other theatre about the property. It’s film.”
But much depends on who is handling the rights. Milne notes that Lifeline got the stage rights for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, even after Peter Jackson acquired the film rights for his epic. “The Tolkien estate is so powerful that they can tell the film company, ‘No, you can’t stop us from licensing plays at the same time.’” Milne does note, with a laugh, that the agreements grew from two-and-a-half pages for The Fellowship of the Ring in 1996 (pre-movie rights) to 20-page documents for the subsequent two pieces. Still, the Tolkien estate, aside from requesting copies of the script and collateral marketing materials (to make sure that the original source was properly credited) put no restrictions on the Lifeline versions.
Similarly, the late Kurt Vonnegut was willing to work with the company when they did The Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle. “Vonnegut and his agent were completely delightful and said, ‘What can you afford to pay?’ The agreement was a page and a half long,” says Milne. The company also had an advantage when it came to staging Adam Langer’s popular novel “Crossing California” earlier this season. Langer, whose novel is set in his native West Rogers Park, told his agent he wanted Rogers Park-based Lifeline to have the stage rights.
Though Milne says it usually helps to start by getting the author on board, she says there has been one notable exception. For years, the company had wanted to do an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” and hoped to premiere it as a two-parter in spring of 2008. “The agent all along was saying, ‘This is going to work, this is going to work, this is going to work.’ And in the end, Larry McMurtry just said no.”
Geographic proximity has been helpful for Laura Eason in two recent adaptations she’s done. The longtime Lookingglass Theatre member most recently adapted Chicagoan Elizabeth Crane’s collection of stories “When the Messenger Is Hot” for Steppenwolf’s First Look Repertory and a subsequent run at 59E59 in New York. Director Jessica Thebus, with whom Eason has worked in the past, knows Crane (“Betsy” to her friends) personally. But even there, despite Crane’s enthusiasm for the project, Eason says, “Working out the subsidiary rights was actually more complicated than I thought it would be.” One of the stories in the collection had already been optioned separately for film rights, though it wasn’t one of the stories Eason planned on using. Eason also says that the situation was made more complicated once the New York production entered the picture. “It wasn’t Betsy being difficult. It’s just everyone is fighting for their best advantage.”
Eason also adapted stories from native son Stuart Dybek’s “The Coast of Chicago” for a 2006 Walkabout and Lookingglass co-production. “Stuart gave us an amazing deal. He took a very small slice because the company has very limited funds.” Eason notes that, even when agents are willing to cut deals for stage rights, they tend to not always understand the economic realities of small theatre companies. The agent of one author, whom Eason declines to name, demanded 50 percent in subsidiary rights, which, according to Eason, is twice the industry standard. (Many rights agreements provide the original author or estate with a percentage from the royalties paid to the adapter by the producing theatres.) “When money starts getting involved, it gets sticky,” Eason says diplomatically.
Sharon Evans, artistic director of Live Bait Theatre, says that sometimes she’s played the “small theatre” card to success. The company presented Kelly Nespor’s adaptation of the stories of food writer M.F.K. Fisher in 1996 under the title I Was Really Very Hungry: A Portrait of M.F.K. Fisher. Evans says that, at the time, the rights had been optioned by film director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential). “What we did was write to him and say, ‘You know, we’re a really small theatre, we want to do a stage version, we won’t bother you in any way.’ And his lawyer called us and said, ‘Yes, as long as you sign a disclaimer that you won’t come back and say that he stole ideas from your stage version. (Hanson never made the film.)
“I advise people to do what is counterintuitive,” says Evans. “Downplay what you’re doing. Don’t talk about how great it’s going to be. Just talk about the fact that you’re small and build it piece by piece.”
Longtime Live Bait associate Edward Thomas-Herrera found that approach didn’t work when he recently attempted to get stage rights to a 1955 British sci-fi b movie, Devil Girl From Mars. The rights now rest with a man in Kansas City who purchased a slew of old movie master prints and licenses them for various film festivals. Thomas-Herrera spent a lot of time trying to explain the budget of a 70-seat live theatre venue to the man, only to find that he wouldn’t budge from his demands for a flat rights fee, plus 35 percent of the box office. On the other hand, Thomas-Herrera points out that Letitia Baldridge, the Jackie Kennedy confidant who wrote the Camelot-era memoir “Of Diamonds and Diplomats,” was quite happy about his adaptation, to the point where she even flew out for the opening night. Then again, Thomas-Herrera notes that Baldridge’s book had been long out of print by the time his 1995 adaptation (revived in 2005) came along. “She is not a Hollywood person,” he says. “I don’t think she ever thought there was a Hollywood prospect for it.”
Thomas-Herrera used material that was in the public domain for his 2002 play at Live Bait, Death on a Pink Carpet, based on the infamous Hollywood scandal involving Lana Turner, her gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, and Cheryl Crane, Turner’s teenage daughter who killed Stompanato during a violent altercation. Thomas-Herrera says that Crane was aware of the play, and that she has apparently read the script, but “she didn’t contact me or raise any objections. It was based on an actual event and no one has a right to history. Of course, she is also the most sympathetic character in the play.” But Thomas-Herrera does acknowledge that, had Crane or her attorneys contacted him, “I would have taken that seriously and talked to them.”
William Massolia, co-artistic director for Griffin Theatre, adapted Letters Home, a show based on the correspondence of Iraq War veterans that premiered last winter and is now touring. In addition to getting rights to use material in Frank Schaeffer’s book “Voices From the Front: Letters Home From America’s Military Family” and the HBO documentary Last Letters Home, Massolia also had to obtain specific individual permission from each soldier (or their surviving family members) whose correspondence is used in the script. And now that the work is touring, Massolia had to re-negotiate the rights from the original arrangement.
Sometimes the difficulty of obtaining rights depends on where the original author lives. Massolia, who adapted popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman’s beloved “Stardust” a couple years ago, says that British authors tend not to have their stage and film rights bundled together. New York agents, according to Massolia, also tend to understand the limitations of small theatres better than their counterparts in movie-centric Los Angeles.
He also says that finding out who actually controls the rights to a property has become much easier in the age of the Internet, since so many authors have their own Web pages and it’s no longer a matter of trying to track an author down through the original publisher of the book, who may or may not still be in contact with the author. Griffin is presenting a stage version of Ned Vizzini’s “Be More Chill” in spring 2008. “We lost the rights to that a year ago because of a film deal,” says Massolia. “That fell through, and now they’re giving us the rights and they’re hoping the stage play will generate some interest in a [new] film deal.”
If one has been in the adaptation game for a while, one inevitably accumulates a list of dream projects that just won’t come together. Joyce Piven, cofounder (with her late husband, Byrne) of Piven Theatre Workshop, has been a celebrated proponent of story theatre for decades. But she acknowledges that even her company’s longstanding reputation wasn’t enough to win the rights to any of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. The O’Connor estate flatly refused to license them.
“I would have spent the rest of my life just doing Flannery O’Connor,” says Piven. She also has been turned down by Philip Roth, an author who would have fit perfectly in Piven’s current show What Dreams May Come: American Visions Through Jewish Eyes, a triptych of short stories about Jewish life in the United States.
Piven feels that one advantage her approach offers the original author is that “we don’t adapt as such. We really use the words on the page. We may rearrange them, we may have a little pocket of improvisation for theatrical license, but the beauty is that we try to have the words live on stage and provide a different kind of experience.”
But after one obtains the rights, the hard work is just beginning. For longtime playwright and first-time adapter Claudia Allen, tackling Stuart Dybek’s novel-in-stories “I Sailed With Magellan” was more of a challenge than she could have imagined, even though, as with Eason and Walkabout, Dybek was apparently quite amenable to the project. (The recent MacArthur “genius” grant recipient has hinted that he may try his hand at playwriting himself, given the success of The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan.)
Allen, who says she made a point of not seeing The Coast of Chicago in order to avoid being influenced by another artist’s choices, found that even with the support of Dybek, the process was far more difficult than she’d imagined when she first proposed the book to Victory Gardens artistic director Dennis Zacek.
“This was two years of my life,” says Allen. “This was more time-consuming by far than when I write my own plays.” And though Allen doesn’t discount the possibility of adapting something again, she says, “I would have to want to really do it, or be paid a lot of money.”
For Eason, who has also adapted work by dead authors such as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, the great joy of working with living authors comes from the feedback she receives.
“There was something I did in weaving one story to another [in The Coast of Chicago]. For Stuart Dybek to come in, who is a genius, to have that caliber of writer say, ‘How did you do that? I would never think of that’—to have him so excited by that is thrilling… You do it because you fall in love with these stories and you want to do justice to them. And for [the authors] to feel like you have is really satisfying.”